THE LONG READ Infrastructure Landlords: The Rentier Capitalism of Commercial Academic Publishers | Open Library of Humanities

If you want to understand where the commercial parts of scholarly communications may be heading, you need to look beyond policy documents, conference panels, or public-facing strategy statements. You should look at what large commercial actors say when speaking to investors. Earnings calls are one of the places where that language becomes especially revealing: less concerned with sector ideals than with growth, market opportunity, competitive position, and what will ultimately generate value for shareholders. For this reason, it can be worthwhile to review earnings calls and investor presentations, as these are often overlooked when discussing OA policy and sectoral movements.

Before getting into the company-by-company detail, it is important to understand what an earnings call is. These calls are part presentation and part Q&A session, where a company’s senior management discusses its recent financial results with analysts. They are usually accompanied by a presentation and a results statement (found on the company website). They tend to cover headline figures such as revenue, profit, costs, debt, and outlook, but they also reveal something more useful: what management thinks is driving performance, where it sees growth, what problems it is trying to solve, and which markets or products it considers strategically important.

This is why they can be worth reading, even for people who are not investors; they offer a direct view into how major commercial players describe the academic and research market when speaking to the financial community. These calls demonstrate where companies believe they have pricing power and which technologies or services they want to expand (or deprecate). How they talk about AI, analytics, licensing, open access, and journal strategy can also be revealing and informs us where they may be seeking tighter customer lock-in or higher-margin recurring revenue. In other words, earnings calls help make visible the commercial logic shaping parts of the scholarly communications system.

At the same time, these calls need to be read critically. Companies usually highlight strengths and downplay weaknesses, and will be motivated to frame results to reassure markets. It is also important to keep in mind that some claims, especially forward-looking ones, are management’s framing (or hoping) rather than independently verified facts. The analysis that follows below treats these calls and presentations as useful evidence of strategy and priorities, but not as neutral truth.

Note: this is not a financial analysis and not financial advice. It is a sector-focused reading of, and commentary upon, company reporting aimed at understanding what these firms say about their performance and direction, and what that may mean for libraries, universities, and scholarly communications more broadly. The author is not a financial expert. 

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